RE: Governor Babangida Aliyu and Northern Emirs; Look who's talking!

Dear Mr Mukhta Usman,

I am a voracious reader of the articles published by Poinblanknews.com.  I read the said speech of the Governor Babangida Aliyu, PhD, a former bureaucrat turns executive Governor of a privileged State in Nigeria.  I have just finished reading your well thought response to a speech that was generally aclaimed in the media.  Your response is genuingly critical of the the elite Governor and I cannot agree with you more.

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Increasingly, the Nigerian political arena is not short of the 'educated' elites these days.  No sooner they find their way into the political machinery, they start to tell us reasons why they were unble to perform.  In their minds, they want us to believe that the educational attainment by them has nothing to do with Governance.  The examples abounds from coast to coast.  I was a student union activist during the Ali must go era.  One of the reasons why students held Ali most responsible then was because he was the most educated of the then military junta members.  He was also the Education Minister, where you will expect him to perform wonderfully, but he failed woefully.  I am particularly concerned about these educated elites finding thier way into governance, we often forget that they are the products of the same cutural elites that dominated us from the word go.  They have to pretend that they are different, so they forms the habits of delivering academic lectures when the oppotunities come thier way rather than delivering on Governance to the people.

I refer to your article, and I quote as follows: "Governor Aliyu is an expression of everything that is wrong with Nigerian politics: the manipulative propensity that has made politics the preserve of the most irresponsible elements of the nation’s elite" I quote further, "In the period June, 1999 to May 2000, in their first one year in office, the local and state governments of the seven states of the North-West alone received a total of 92.5 billion naira from the Federation Account! The local governments received N22.5 billion and seven out of twelve state governments in the North received N30.0 billion with a total population of about 30 million. This means for every single men, women, child and infant they received a total of N1, 733.3 which they have solemnly sworn to use for their security and welfare. There are no indications in terms of the living conditions of these citizens that they have used these billions of naira as they have sworn to do. The fact is that far from the states of the North being economically weak, their economy is actually well-endowed but it is very oppressive and exploitative of the producers of the wealth. A political ruling class made up of local, states and federal government bureaucrats and executives has established a strangle-hold on the lives of the peasant farmers, pastoralist, traders, craftsmen, workers and artisans in these states".

Another point you made concerns the way our Government ignored the children entirely in Nigeria.  Our children's needs are mainly good nutrition, healthcare and education.  The best country in the world today have perfected the art of child-based programes that constantly feed the workforce in the eventual years.  Each child is given the opportunities to grow up nurished within the interactive provisions of aboundant food, avalability of good and affordable healthcare, and good and well integrated educational systems.  In Nigeria today, 40+ years after independent, there has never being a national budget that addressed the welfatre of our children.  That aspect has been left for the parents to kind of 'know what to do about it' in a sort of way.  I would think that there should have been a national food policy entrenched as our way of life.  Our educational food research could have came up with recipies that enhanced our cutural diets from Cross-River to Sokoto and present same to the people of the nation by way of education.  I still believe that traditional methods of cooking our foods are to blame in large extent for poor nutrition.  However I lament just as you do that large population of our children in the North do not have good nutrition in their diet while growing up inpite of the aboundance of seemingly good nutritous food around them.  The following is your take on this: "The nutrition health and the general welfare of the children in any society is one of the best indicators of the general living conditions of the people in that society. Here you have states which lead the rest of the country in the production of foodstuff, particularly protein-rich beans and meat, but the children of these states are much more under nourished than children in other states who are not so well-endowed".

Once again, I agree with you entirely on your point of view.  I also want you to know that no part of the country is without self proclaimed 'Mr Right'.  They are everywhere and that explains the fact that Nigeria nation is about doomed unless something drastic is done to change the attitudes in the Goverment.

Simeon Oladimeji (M Sc Industrial Tech)
USA